127. Netherworld
The corridors were endless, and nothing Jayhawk did could make them lead
anywhere but back to the djinn. She wondered whether time was passing,
outside. Ratty's spirit journey had taken three days and three nights.
She wasn't sure whether there was that much time left before the end.
A sudden thought struck her, as she hesitated in the middle of a passage
junction, wondering which way to go. She reached out to one of the
walls, drew a square on it with the tip of her finger, visualizing a
blue line. Light sprang from her touch, outlined the square. It was an
opening into a new corridor, perpendicular to the one she was in. Or
was it an old corridor, something that had been behind the wall all along?
It didn't matter. She could shape this maze to her liking, with enough
patience.
Slowly, with many trips back to the center to check her work, she cut
new doorways and closed old ones, carving the corridors into a schematic
diagram of Anubis. She had no way to represent the nodes themselves,
but she could model the connectivity, the flow of information. It felt
strange, pacing the familiar patterns but with no sense at all of
response, no contact with Anubis. An ashen lonely feeling.
At last she finished it, sat down in the center to think. It was
lifeless, a mere representation. Could she pull it into activity?
She could...and Anubis would exist here, if nowhere else. She was not
at all sure that she could unmake it again. It would be here, formed
out of the substrate of this place as it had once been formed out of the
Overnet. *She* would be here. She'd never leave, not really--she might
escape for a while, but it would be like going to the Matrix, leaving
Anubis behind.
She sat for a long time, considering that.
It would give her power; she guessed that she could coerce the djinn, if
his habitation were reshaped into hers. It would probably give her more
than that, as binding herself to the Overnet had given her power over
the Matrix, the Gates, even the physical world.
She would be a creature of death.
She wasn't sure what that meant. She hadn't spent a lot of time
thinking about death; it was no asset to a 'runner. If she'd imagined
anything, it was non-existence. But Ratty had been there, had come back
to tell of a broken city, darkness, ruin, the Spider. Death as a place.
He seemed to have been right.
At last she swore aloud, got up and began reshaping passages. She
wouldn't leave a map of Anubis here, where something vile might stray
into it. When it was distorted beyond recognition, she began picking
her way back to the djinn.
The chamber, when she finally found it, was empty. She touched a key on
the keyboard and the djinn sprang back into place. "Back again?" he
said nastily. His edges were squared and uneven, as if the resolution
of his image wasn't high enough to form true curves. She found herself
wanting to edit it, reached out to do so, met nothing--no sense that she
had any power in this place, though her door-drawing had proven
otherwise.
"Tell me what you need," she said simply, "and I will try to help you."
"I don't need anything from you."
"Will you help me, then? Please?"
"I don't have anything for you, either."
"You said that you did, earlier. Were you lying?"
"I was wrong. I didn't know what kind of person you were. The advice I
would have given would be valueless to you, and I prefer not to offer
it."
"And you don't have any other way to help? It's not just for me. There
are innocent people depending on what I do."
"You think pretty highly of yourself for an obsolete piece of computing
equipment. You'll be replaced. In a few years no one will remember you
except to laugh at you. Believe me. I've seen it a thousand times."
"Do others find you, when they come here?" Against her will, she was
furious again.
"Sometimes, some of them."
She wanted to destroy him. With the power implicit in re-creating
Anubis here she could do it. And what would happen then? An empty
place, a trap with no escape? Or would she become this place's
guardian, bound to it forever?
"How do I get out of here?" she said savagely.
"You got in here, didn't you? Should have thought of that sooner."
She whirled, walked away. It was hard not to cringe; somehow she
expected a blow, but none came. The model of Anubis was easy to find.
She repaired the one flaw she'd introduced, stood in the center. It was
hollow, empty, a bitter mockery of her system.
She tried to imagine how awakening it would feel. Not like being in the
Overnet, intuition whispered....heavier, harder, a vibration to it like
the presence of a huge engine, not the light-play effortlessness of the
system she knew. She could almost touch the reality of her imagining.
Slowly, methodically, she began to unknit the web of corridors she'd
linked together, erase corridor-mouths and shift walls until no trace of
Anubis remained. When she was finished, she faced a blank black wall.
There was no way back, no way through the challenge she was facing here.
She could not deal with the djinn--she *would* not--and she would not
bind herself to the death-lands.
With an effort--it was hard to focus herself without Anubis, hard to
work within the limitations of humanity--she cleared her mind of the
surrounding graphics. She had no destination in mind, only the desire
not to be here any longer. She stepped forward, through the black wall,
into darkness.
--
Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner